SCHOLARSHIP FOUNDATION INVESTS IN MILITARY’S CHILDREN

Thousands nationwide, including more than 130
from Pendleton, awarded

When Karen Kelly’s son died in Afghanistan, she felt a duty to honor him and the sacrifices he made as the child of a Marine and later as a Marine himself.

First Lt. Robert Kelly, a 29-year-old platoon commander and prior enlisted Marine, was killed in Sangin on Nov. 9, 2010, with Camp Pendleton’s 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. His father, Gen. John Kelly, is head of U.S. Southern Command.

“I decided on the day I found out … that I would do something to make my son proud,” Karen Kelly said in an interview, pausing as tears welled in her eyes. “Because I was very proud of him. And I would not allow his death to … I just wanted to do something good. Because out of everything, out of the pain that we feel, something good has to come out of it.

“Some people choose to wallow in self-pity,” she said. “I chose to do something positive, because I think my son would be very disappointed in me if I didn’t.”

In those raw early moments of her grief, Karen Kelly started working with the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation, and later joined the board of directors. Although she was terrified of public speaking, the Gold Star mother found her voice as an advocate for Marine families and helped raise nearly $1.3 million for a scholarship in her son’s name.

The First Lieutenant Robert Kelly Memorial Scholarship is going this year to Kristen Trout, the daughter of a Marine infantry veteran. The junior and history major at Gettysburg College hopes to make a career working in a museum of military history.

Her scholarship is among a record amount of education support awarded this academic year by the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation. The organization is “honoring Marines by educating their children,” dispersing more than $6.6 million in scholarship funding for 2013-14, an 11 percent increase compared with the previous year.

The organization gives need-based scholarships for college and technical training to children of Marines and Navy hospital corpsmen, with preference given to relatives of those wounded or killed in combat. Since it was formed in 1962, the foundation has awarded more than 30,000 scholarships worth more than $80 million.

For its American Patriots Campaign, the foundation has raised more than $89 million since 2007 toward its goal of $160 million by late 2016. Donors include a Vista-based medical equipment company, DJO Global, that gave its millionth dollar this year to the foundation.

Those funds are supporting scholarships for 2,040 children nationwide this year, including more than 130 students in the greater Camp Pendleton area.

Fifty of them were honored in late July at Camp Pendleton, at the second annual awards ceremony at the base attended by Marine leaders, families of scholarship recipients, and donors.

“You have known really no other childhood and adolescence than a nation at war,” Margaret Davis, president of the foundation, told them.

Most students beginning college this fall were first-graders when terrorists attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. For children of Marines, the coming years were filled with long separations and anxiety as parents deployed repeatedly.